Sunday, January 27, 2013

draft Introduction

This book
is a response to a new world, the world that comes after the end of
nature.It is a try at making sense of a
new time, when people, for the first time, have become a force in the history
of the planet: the chemistry of the atmosphere, and of the oceans, the cycles
of weather and the seasons, and the DNA that give life its shapes, all carry
our mark.It is a map of an earth that
we have made, as surely as we make our cities, highways, housing tracts, and
cornfields.Some call our era the anthropocene, the age of man.If you like that word, then this is a book
about living in the anthropocene.

It is,
partly, a book about what we lose in this new world, what is no longer
possible.The idea of environmentalism, for one, has to change
or die. As the word itself shows, it is
about the relation between humans and our habitat, our environs.The spirit of environmentalism, its beating
heart, has been about honoring and preserving the natural world, a nature that was here before us and goes
on, whatever we do – unless we harm it past repair.But in this new world, there is no nature
that is separate from us, no border to preserve between humanity and its
habitat.The question is we will,
unavoidably, shape the places where we live, a problem that shares more with
landscape architecture than with respecting the ancient and permanent nature
that envelops us [like a starry sphere surrounding the earth in some medieval
cosmological map].

We also
have to give up on the idea that we can control the earth.In this way, the comparison to landscape
architecture is misleading: we must face its questions, but without its
tools.Human power is incomparably
greater than it has ever been before; but human control, control over the
planet our power makes, is terrifyingly weak.Climate change distills this dilemma to its essence: we brew the storms,
bring the droughts, and raise the seas, but we cannot decide, or even
understand, the shape these will take.It is as if we had re-created the ancient pagan world, in which nature
was populated by arbitrary, violent gods – one for the thunderbolts, one for
the sea – who warred with one another and made human destinies their
playthings.

Just as
important, we must give up a thought that has been terribly important to
environmentalism: that nature has lessons to teach us, a moral point of view,
that we can live well by “following nature” or “honoring nature.”It is like realizing that the wooden idols we
are asking for guidance were in fact carved by our ancestors, that it is we and
neighbors who are imagining what they tell us: in trying to listen to nature,
we are only finding ways to listen, indirectly, to ourselves.

The reason
for this goes beyond the physical fact that we shape the world, chemically,
biologically, and geologically.The
reasons are also philosophical.It is
inescapable today that, when people throughout history have talked about
“nature,” they have meant something they
valued and thought important, human values that they conveniently found in the
natural world.Presidents, preachers,
and activists have called on nature to justify nearly anything one can think
of: monarchy and democracy, slavery and universal freedom, saving wild places
and turning them into settlements and fields.Women, in particular, have been subject to seemingly endless accounts of
how nature distinguishes them from men and assigns them a separate place in
social life.The lesson of all of this
is that the natural world gives us no model for our shared lives, no social or
political or moral blueprint.There is
no getting out of the human standpoint, the human attachment to ideas about who
we are and how we should live.If – by a
kind of miracle – we could ever see through the eyes of another species, it
would be overwhelmingly, gloriously alien, and utterly unconcerned with what
freedom, equality, or progress might mean to human beings.As for nature, the whole world, even before
our powers overtook it, it was never the kind of thing that could have a point
of view.There is other consciousness in
the world, intensely and mysteriously different from our own, but the world,
sea, air, and living things, is not consciousness.[It is even more different than that.]It is something else altogether.[This only really made sense as a version of
the idea that God made the world to instruct us.]

This change
has drastic meaning for the ways that environmentalists have talked and
thought.Environmental themes have grown
out of two very old ways of imagining human experience, two basic kinds of
stories.One is the apocalyptic story, a tale of how the world ends.Born from Christian religious imagery and a
long tradition of sermons, the apocalyptic story forecasts a series of
disasters that, taken together, form a judgment on humanity.Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring put the end of the world at the center of modern environmentalism,
where it has remained ever since.Carson’s prophecy of “a poisoned world” was not just a scientist’s
prediction of what pesticides would do to living things; it was also a kind of
sermon of how an arrogant species had strayed from nature’s path and must
return or face the punishment it had brought on itself.Generations of ministers and secular prophets
had laid Carson’s path, inveighing against those who had broken their compact
with God or with justice.It was not
hard to transfer that transcendent authority from God to nature, while the
story remained the same.That story
lends its moral impulse to scientific forecasts of the effects of climate change,
which read like a parade of biblical judgments – flood, drought, pestilence,
and plague.Nature, though, does not
exist to pass judgment on us.It could
do no such thing.It is not even an
“it,” not one thing that we could coherently imagine as passing judgment.Nature is the dissonant symphony of forces,
processes, and materials, some alive, many not, which we dwell in, are shaped
by, and shape.

The whole
apocalyptic tradition, which has done so much to make environmentalism
intuitive and familiar, is a religious inheritance, misapplied to something –
the natural world – that we only distort by interpreting it as having a moral
point of view.This point suggests
something I strongly suspect is true: the long habit of seeing nature as having
a moral standpoint, whether to pass judgment or to guide us, is a side-effect
of monotheism.We could see this vast,
wildly diverse web of phenomena as having one meaning, a meaning directed to
us, only because we already imagined nature as the work of a creator who was
intensely interested in us, as a text from the hand of God, written in soil and
stone.If nature is not the work of a
divine mind, there is no other serious way of seeing it as able to instruct and
judge us.

There is a
similar problem, though not exactly religious, for the other kind of story that
has made environmental themes so easy for many to accept and absorb.This is the pastoral, the morality tale of the man who leaves the city and
learns to see more clearly in the simple life of the countryside.The pastoral was already a literary device
for social criticism in classical Roman poetry, and Horace’s Eclogues, with their virtuous shepherds
set against the corruptions of sophistication, remain the taproot of the
tradition.Thoreau was not a simple
thinker, but he used the pastoral image of simplicity to make his cabin at
Walden Pond a staging-ground for one of the most enduring pieces of American
dissent.A pastoral writer claims that
nature takes sides in human arguments, between militarism and pacifism, luxury
and austerity, and, for Thoreau, freedom and slavery.But just as nature does not judge or guide
us, it does not take sides.Again, it is
not the kind of thing that could.

Pastoral
and apocalyptic themes, then, were a kind of cocoon in which environmental
ideas took shape.They sheltered new
ideas about people and nature, let them grow until they could live on their
own.To live now, though, environmental
ideas must become quite different from the shape that fitted the cocoon.They will have to change from the forms that
enabled them to grow, and give up conceits that have drawn much of their
power.That is, if environmentalists
want to be serious today, they will have to find new ways of talking about the
things that are most important to them.[So will everyone who thinks, talks, and cares about the human relation
to the natural world.]

Some people
say that, for all these reasons, environmentalism as we know it is over, and
the sooner the better.They say that it
carries on religious and philosophical ideas that artificially divided humans
from the rest of the living world, ideas that echoed other artificial
divisions, such as those among races or between the sexes.They point out that much of environmental
politics has grown up among mainly white elites, and especially that “nature”
has been a balm for the neuroses of white men who wanted to escape the
complexity of effeminate civilization, from Thoreau to Teddy Roosevelt.“Nature” has been the opposite of the
households, the cities, and the democratic politics where people of different
sorts have to deal with one another, and so it has been a kind of idyll of
boyhood escapism, carried poisonously into the cultural politics of adulthood.They say that defining problems like climate
change as “environmental,” rather than simply as challenges for humanity, gives
special authority to these parochial and antique attitudes, when we should be
opening those issues to full, open, and democratic disagreement about how to
share the burdens of the harm we have caused.

There is
something to all of this, but it is more wrong than right.The task is not to get rid of environmental
ideas, but to remake them.The thing is
not to discard our inheritance because the past was morally flawed and
philosophically confused, but to sort through it and begin to understand what
we cannot or should not believe anymore about ourselves and nature, what we can
still believe but only in a different way, and which old ideas we can still
live by.Of course, this is not
straightforward.It is certainly not a
matter of holding abstract ideas about “us and nature” up to some political or
philosophical standard.Ideas, at least
the ideas discussed in this book, are distilled out of life.Their raw materials are experience, activity,
and feeling.The real question about
environmental ideas is whether we can find ways to live by them, ways that they
can be true descriptions of where and how we live, and even what we live for.Nonetheless, we can begin.

Here is an
example.Apocalyptic and pastoral
stories do not need to disappear, but they will have to become something else:
not stories about what nature wants from us, how nature takes sides in our
arguments, but instead ways that we engage the natural world through our human
arguments.That is, we will have to
grasp that these stories really are
what they have always been: ways of talking to one another, ways of challenging
how we are living and seeking better ways to be.When we talk this way, we will have to be
able to admit to one another, and to ourselves, what we are doing.If we learn to talk about nature this way, it
cannot have the same meaning as when it was a stand-in for an absent God or a
social critique that the speaker did not feel able to make in her own,
unauthorized voice.

Here is
another example.There is strong
criticism of the part that wilderness has played in environmental ideas.Incisive critics have argued that wilderness
is the ultimate set-piece of a “nature” that is separate from humanity, the
opposite of civilization, a perfect screen for projecting whatever we want (or fear)
the natural world to be.Again, there is
something important to this.There is
really no such thing as a wilderness, if that word means a part of nature we
have not touched, and the very idea that there could be grows out of ways of
thinking that put nature on one side of a stark and artificial divide, humanity
on the other.As if to prove the point,
the “wilderness” that environmentalists have pressed to create and preserve is
often in places whose indigenous inhabitants were cleared from the land not
long before white aesthetes and adventurers discovered them as temples of
unspoiled nature.These critics urge
that a wilderness-based environmentalism is a license to ignore the messy, in
between places, in no way pure, where we live, in favor of loyalty to the
imagined purity of wilderness, a faraway elsewhere where our real selves await.

It is just
as important, though, to ask what has been the value of wilderness, and whether
some of that value survives the criticisms.Preserving wilderness has always been a way of relinquishing mastery, a
deliberate acceptance that human uses will not govern every place.Not every tree will be timbered, not every
mineral will be mined, and not every vista will become a house site or a
highway overlook.Of course it takes
human will to create and preserve wilderness, and the values that lead us to do
so are human values; but what they express and cultivate in us is very
different from the human qualities that come forward when everything goes to
economic uses.A choice to practice
these values is part of the meaning of wilderness, part of why it has mattered
so much to so many people.

Here is
another thing about wilderness, and an essential one.Preserving it does not just elevate certain
ways of being human. It also brings
alive one kind of relationship with a part of the natural world.Preserving wilderness puts people in a
posture of relinquishment toward specific valleys, ridges, forests, and rivers,
and everything that lives there.Similarly, when a writer like Thoreau, or Annie Dillard a century and a
half later, takes on a pastoral voice, she is not just telling a story from the
culture’s grab-bag.She is entering a
relationship with a landscape, paying it a quality of attention that, over
time, becomes more nearly inseparable from her own ways of seeing and of
speaking.The features of the place
become the patterns of her eye, the images of her voice.If she succeeds, her seeing and her speaking
become ways of understanding the place, of showing it a kind of regard.A subtle part of that regard lies in her
recognizing what she cannot entirely understand, what remains obscure to her,
what is the only the dance of her imagination, and the borderline between what
she can know and what must be a mystery.What is beholding us when an animal looks back – that is a mystery.What to make of the incorrigible instinct
that a landscape, closely attended, becomes a metaphor for consciousness, and
shows us things about ourselves that we had not seen directly – that, maybe, is
not just projection, but a mystery too.

That,
anyway, is the argument of this book.The meaningful relationships that we form with nature are not just
superstitions, fancies, or philosophical mistakes.Nor, however, are they what they have often
been imagined as being – communion with a divine or indwelling intelligence,
lessons in morality or how to live, or the sentimental ties of Disney
movies.The challenge is to say what
they are, what way of understanding these relationships can be consistent with
living in the anthropocene.

Here, for a start, are two basic
kinds of reasons for taking nature’s meaning seriously, treating it as part of
reality.First, it is impossible to
imagine most of our environmental law, politics, and culture without these
meanings.These are all rooted in ideas
about how nature matters: what wilderness can show us about ourselves, why it
is important for rivers to run clean, how it is better for the world to be full
of species than to be cleared by extinction.It is true that parts of the laws regulating pollution are keyed only to
straightforward human interests, such as health; but these are a small portion.Second, the meanings we find in nature have a
basis in fact.The world around us really
is full of awareness, experience, perception, that is like and unlike our
own.It is also full of pattern, order,
life that tie us to it, chemically and biologically, but also aesthetically and
symbolically.To try to clear the world
of meaning would be as serious a mistake as naively trusting every meaning we
imagine in it.The old, sentimental, superstitious
mistake was believing in a world that was excessively humanized, full of minds,
or one vast mind, like our own.But
trying to drive all meaning out of our relations to nature would be a mistake
in the opposite direction.It would be
an attack on an essential part of being human.

This book, then, is both an
argument about nature and an argument about humanity.The heart of the argument about humanity is
that we are meaning-making creatures; we live and move in the medium of
meaning, just as surely as we move in three-dimensional space.We argue, act upon, and sometimes die for
competing interpretations of – to take a few examples – freedom, equality,
Islam, or America.All of these are, in
one sense, pure fictions, but if we somehow forgot them, we would be unrecognizable
to ourselves.Without some version of
some such things, we would not know, indeed, would not know how to know, how to
live.We act together in vast,
consequential ways because we treat meanings like these as real, as tying us
together or dividing us over principle.This does not mean, by any stretch, that everything we believe, we must
believe.Maybe religion in its familiar
forms is unnecessary and surmountable; maybe patriotism, at least as a form of
tribalism worth killing for, is a terrible and unnecessary affliction.Try, though, to imagine a world with no
picture of what matters in life, or no vision of solidarity to say what ties
people together.We must, inescapably,
steer our way through certain unavoidable problems: how to spend, or hope to
spend, our short time alive on earth; how to make sense of our sharing this
place with so many other people, who are our unavoidable competitors, our
possible enemies and allies, and our best collaborators.In webs and communities of meaning, we
navigate these problems, and turn the raw terrains of our lives into halfway
intelligible landscapes.The natural
world is just as much a field in which we must act, and so which we navigate by
meaning.In some ways, we make or create
this meaning; but in other ways we encounter it as something apart from us, and
it is only because it is real in this way that it enables us to choose, to act
together, and so to live.[Maybe look at
formulations elsewhere.]

These are large, abstract ideas,
and stated briefly and sweepingly.A
large part of this book is dedicated to vindicating them in more concrete
ways.This happens through a history of
the interplay between ideas and the most practical of actions, lawmaking and
politics.Americans have been able to
act as they have toward the natural world because of how they have imagined it
– as a wilderness designed by God to become a garden, as a piece of symbolic
art with the power to bring spiritual insight, as a storehouse of essential
resources to be dedicated to increasing national wealth.Each image has created a circuit between
humans and the rest of the world, a way of seeing it, of knowing how to act
toward it.As a matter of meaning, each
image creates a world.More concretely,
each image has inspired laws that channel human energy, shaping the natural
landscape to resemble influential images of it: from parks and wilderness areas
to subdivisions and the corn-and-soybean rectangles of the Midwest, we spell
out the logic of our imagination in the landscapes that we create.

A history of environmental law is
also a history of American democracy.Social movements, national political leadership, and cultural innovation
have all generated new ideas about nature and helped put those ideas into
practice as law.Later chapters
describe, for instance, how the Sierra Club at the end of the nineteenth
century took fairly abstract and literary ideas from the Transcendentalists and
turned them into the concrete basis of a social movement, a new style of
environmental politics, and a widely accepted story about the value of open
lands and national parks.President
Theodore Roosevelt once claimed in a major speech that his whole reform agenda,
from labor law to antitrust, was best understood as the principle of
natural-resource conservation writ large.In other words, this is not a history of ideas in any straightforward
way.Instead, it is a history of how
ideas have made action possible, how they have tied together bands of
activists, given presidents the language to explain and justify their programs,
and lent their shape to laws institutions that mold the country as surely as
landscape architecture.

These ideas about nature have been
closely involved in the broader issues of American history.They were integral to frontier settlement and
the ideology of free labor that defined the political identity of the North
before and during the Civil War and became dominant themes in the Manifest
Destiny ideology of the later nineteenth century; they were key to the first
Progressive movement and the rise of the regulatory state; and they tied
Transcendentalist cultural and literary dissent to the creation of the national
parks and the US wilderness system.And
all of this was before the modern environmental era began, politically in the
1960s and legally with the passage of most of federal anti-pollution law and
the law of biodiversity between 1970 and 1977.Regulating nature has never been a narrow, specialized task, or at least
not for long, and ideas about nature have never remained just literary and
aesthetic conceits.The imaginative and
practical dimensions, vision and action, have been like two spirals in a double
helix.The history of law, politics, and
power is incomplete the history of imagination.Our landscapes, natural and human, bear the shape of both.[Introduce terms, environmental imagination and environmental
language, or not?]

The history, then, is a philosophical
argument.It is the kind of argument
that succeeds best through fact and narrative, because the claim is that this
philosophical perspective, with its emphasis on meaning and ideas, is necessary
to make sense of the facts and history.The history reveals the present world as the joint creation of power and
imagination, including the power – sometimes but not always democratic power –
that imagination makes possible.

That is not its only purpose.The history is also a sorting-through of
inherited environmental ideas, a start to judging which strands we can keep,
which we should discard, and which we must transform if we want to live by
them.Because the book approaches
history as a trove of living ideas, elements of imagination and compasses for
power and action, it pays special attention to those that are most disturbing.One chapter examines the role that racism,
xenophobia, and obtuse privilege have played in American environmental
imagination and asks what dangers these might show in the ideas we still
hold.Another addresses the case
“against nature” much more fully than this Introduction does, engaging John
Stuart Mill’s powerful argument that the very idea of nature is philosophically
useless at best, politically vicious at worst, and that intellectual honesty
should lead us to throw it out altogether.All of this is a stress test of the integrity of environmental ideas, an
inquiry into whether they are sound and, where they are not, whether they can
be repaired.

The history points to the present
and beyond.If ideas and action are
woven together in all the past of environmental law and politics, there is
every reason to expect that their braiding will also make the future.The problems of the anthropocene confound
traditional ideas of humanity and nature, and they do so even as those old ideas
become implausible.However we engage
climate change, by overcoming our for-now boundless appetites or by engineering
the earth from pole to pole, we will become different people in the course of
it, and will inhabit a different world.The same is true of the judgments we reach about engineering life, or
about how to shape a global food system for nine billion people and a living
planet.This prospect may be just a
little less daunting when we consider that these are new instances of what we
have always done.We are the species
that becomes different people, partly by inventing new ideas, partly by
wrestling together with practical problems – and these, again, are two spirals
in the same helix.It is especially
worth remembering this in a time that tends to forget it, assuming
“realistically” that ideas do not matter, when human reality is a composite of
facts and ideas.

What kinds of environmental ideas
and imagination will serve us in the problems of the anthropocene?How will these shape a new environmental law,
politics, economics, aesthetics, and ethics?Although it is impossible to give the answers that the future will have
to generate, we can know something about the questions.

Take environmental law.Its modern form, particularly the
anti-pollution laws of the 1970s, is a scheme for managing natural
systems.It is highly technical, even
technocratic, involving chemistry, medical statistics, and economic projections
that numb most minds and tempt decision-makers and scholars to imagine that
their job is to reach the one, technically best answer to complex
problems.Older forms of environmental
law, such as the laws of the national parks and wilderness systems, are very
different. Essentially continental
zoning in service of aesthetics, they explicitly dedicate tracts of nature to
ideals of beauty, sublimity, or adventure.In those laws, regulating the human relation to nature is a part of
cultural politics, a way of sustaining certain human values and
experiences.But those laws, and the
people who made them, served mainly spectacular, dramatic, “wild” places, and
had little regard for all the places where people worked and lived, where
nature and humanity were palpably merged – as they are everywhere today.Moreover, they had little concern for
managing complex systems: drawing boundaries around a region and preserving what
lies within them is not simple, but it is vastly simpler than governing the
interplay of economy and ecology, people and the rest of the world, that make
up our lives outside those preserving boundaries.

Neither of these approaches is
enough.Our cultural concern for nature
now needs to reach much farther than the secular temples to beauty and
sublimity that were once its touchstones.Our cultural interest in nature needs to match the scale of our power,
which means asking how we wish to shape it at every point and in every
dimension.This is the only way we have
a prayer of generating principles of responsibility that can match the scale of
our power.If these are the questions we
are asking, the answers cannot be technocratic.They will unavoidably be answers about kind of world we wish to inhabit
and the kinds of lives we wish to make possible.Environmental law will have to work on the
scale of whole ecosystems, even on the scale of global systems such as the
atmosphere, while openly taking sides on issues of value, beauty, and
imagination.[This taking of sides is
not for the sake of partisanship, but because it is inevitable, once we
acknowledge the scope of our power and try to expand our conceptions of
responsibility accordingly.]Its questions
will still be those of chemistry, economics, and public health; but they will
also, quite unavoidably, be the questions of landscape architecture, of shaping
experience by shaping a physical world.One later chapter sets out how we might begin reimagining our food
system as a response to these questions.

Environmental politics, too, will
have to take a new shape, perhaps even develop a new language, for the
anthropocene.If this seems overblown,
consider what a recent development the very idea of the environment is, and how far its elements are from being
obviously parts of one thing.Before
sometime in the 1960s, it would hardly have occurred to anyone to say that
wilderness, industrial pollution, litter, extinctions, zoning, and the health
of waterways were elements of something called “the environment.”The new environmental movement that helped to
create environmental politics and law also, in a real way, created the very
thing that defined, “the environment” as a concept that could unify these rather
diverse problems.There is no reason to
expect that a concept formed around this particular cluster should serve us
well now.

Environmentalists will have to
consider which values are theirs in questions like genetic engineering, where
the familiar impulse to defend “natural” life runs up against the new fact that
nothing is wholly natural, that every question is about how, not whether, to
shape the world and the other life that shares it with us.They will also have to take seriously the
challenge that climate change, which many see as the defining environmental
problem of the time, is not specifically “environmental” at all.It involves the whole energy economy, all of
transport infrastructure, massive public engineering near the coasts of rising seas,
public health crises associated with higher temperatures, and acute questions
about how to distribute the burdens of a disrupted world among rich, poor, and
newly rich countries.It seems, on the
one hand, that environmentalism must
have something to say about both genetic engineering and climate change, and,
on the other, that if these are environmental questions, then there is little
in technology, economic life, or much else that is not environmental. Becoming
all things brings the risk of being nothing at all.

The heart of environmental politics
will not be the specific problems it engages, but the questions it asks about
all these problems.The questions are
the ones at the heart of environmental meaning.What is the value of the natural world?How should we live with respect to it?What kinds of people will living well with the rest of nature enable us
to be, and what is that worth to us?What relationships do we want to cultivate with specific places,
species, and systems, and how should those help us to understand our place in
the larger living world?In the
anthropocene, environmental issues overrun their inherited, topical
boundaries.We need to remember, now,
that we can give up those boundaries.They are not ancient but recent, and there is little to protect in
defining them as environmental.There is everything to protect, however, in
the question, in asking how we want to live in relation to the world.

There are later chapters dedicated
to environmental ethics and economics, and for now I will make a few
assertions, which are spelled out further there.Ethics is more basic than economics because,
whatever its technique, economics takes its values from outside its own
method.When it serves as a guide to
action, economics depends on ethics twice over.The judgment about which outside values to take into account is an
ethical one, built into the techncrat’s formulas.At the same time, those outside values –
whatever they are – always come from the ways that people have come to prize or
despise some part of nature.Economic
technique is an ethical judgment about which ethical judgments to count, and it
cannot generate the standards for either judgment on its own power.

But ethics is very far from being a
master science.Much of environmental
ethics has tried to identify objective value in nature, or disprove the
possibility of doing so, as if we could get the ethical facts right, then
proceed to deduce the right laws and policies from those truths.This strikes me as unconvincing philosophically,
but even if it were persuasive in the abstract, it would be little help in
orienting law and politics.Environmental values that shape those areas grow out of the interplay of
imagination and practical struggle, and ethics is most useful when it takes
them a little further, states them somewhat more clearly, or shows
difficulties, potential, or connections in them.The environmental ethics that is most in the spirit
of this book is a part of a democratic political, legal, and cultural argument
about the meaning of the natural world and our place in it.